Settings → Email Settings is where you control how outbound email looks to customers and which account it actually sends from. The page has two separate connection mechanisms plus a shared sender-configuration form — it's worth understanding how they relate before you start clicking Connect.
Connecting your Google Workspace account (OAuth)
The "Google Workspace email (send-as)" card at the top is the real, self-service connection. Click Connect and you're sent to Google's OAuth flow (via /api/workspace-email/oauth/start). Once connected, the card shows "Connected as {your Google account email}" and the date you connected, plus a Disconnect button.
This isn't just cosmetic — once connected, quotes, invoices, and Inbox replies actually send through that Gmail account (ahead of the SMTP relay described below), and incoming mail to that address gets polled into your Inbox. If the card shows a "Not configured yet" badge, the workspace integration itself hasn't been configured on this deployment (it requires a Google client ID to be set) — the Connect button still appears but stays disabled, so there's nothing to click yet.
One gotcha: this feature depends on Google's OAuth app verification for the Gmail scopes it needs. Until that verification is complete, a connect attempt or an inbound sync can fail with an error even though the button and flow otherwise work normally.
The SMTP status card is a fallback, not a second thing to set up
Below the Workspace card is a "Google Workspace SMTP" status strip — green and "Connected — sending from {address}" if SMTP is configured, amber otherwise. This is the fallback path used only for shops that haven't connected via OAuth above. It's controlled by environment variables (SMTP_HOST, SMTP_USER, SMTP_PASS) rather than anything you click in the app.
Important gotcha: when SMTP isn't connected, the page shows a boxed "Connect your Google Workspace email" walkthrough with numbered steps (enable 2-Step Verification, generate a Google App Password, add it to your .env, restart the server). Despite the heading, this is not a self-service flow you can complete from your account — it requires editing server environment variables and restarting the app, which is a developer/hosting-level task, not something you do from Settings. If you land on this box expecting to just log in, use the Connect button in the card above instead, or hand these steps to whoever manages your server environment.
Display name, reply-to, and the test email
The Sender Configuration card lets you set a Display name (defaults to your shop name) and a Reply-to address (defaults to your shop's email) — these control how you appear in the customer's inbox and where their replies land, not which account actually sends the mail. A live preview below the fields shows the From line, Reply-to line, and a sample quote subject exactly as they'd render in Gmail. Click Save settings to persist changes.
The "Send a test email" card lets you fire a real test message to any address. Note that the Send test button is only enabled when SMTP is connected — it's gated on the "Google Workspace SMTP" status shown above, independent of whether you've connected a Workspace account via OAuth. So it's possible to have a working Google Workspace connection at the top of the page while this test button stays disabled with "Your email provider isn't connected yet."